MIT

For the last few decades, microchip manufacturers have been on a quest to find ways to make the patterns of wires and components in their microchips ever smaller, in order to fit more of them onto a single chip and thus continue the relentless progress toward faster and more powerful computers. That progress has become more difficult recently, as manufacturing processes bump up against fundamental limits involving, for example, the wavelengths of the light used to create the patterns.

Society’s increasing reliance on the internet, computers and mobile phones puts stringent demands on technological developments. Shrinking the electronic components – in other words, increasing the number of transistors on a single chip – is not an easy task as current components are already reaching atom-like sizes.

A family of compounds known as perovskites, which can be made into thin films with many promising electronic and optical properties, has been a hot research topic in recent years. But although these materials could potentially be highly useful in applications such as solar cells, some limitations still hamper their efficiency and consistency. Now, a